A Fine Balance: Marriage and Duty Collide in Jhumpa Lahiri's Family Saga The Lowland

In the floodplains in the south of Calcutta, in the wake of colonial rule, two brothers, born just fifteen months apart, scale the walls of a country club, entering a realm of eerie, green-lawned splendor, a place where gin fizzes are served and a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II still hangs on the wall. One night, they’re caught, and their punishment is harsh and arbitrary. In just a few introductory pages we glimpse the thematic scope of Jhumpa Lahiri’s second novel, The Lowland (Knopf), which spans four generations and 70 years to tell a classic story of family and ideology at odds, love and risk closely twined. As the inseparable Mitra brothers come of age amid India’s turbulent sixties, adventurous Udayan is drawn to the revolutionary Naxalite movement—whose tactics turn increasingly desperate—while the introspective Su­bhash moves to coastal Rhode Island to study oceanography, remaining there until he receives word of Udayan’s death. Back home, he meets his brother’s pregnant young widow, Gauri, a beautiful philosophy student now doomed to a life of renunciation. In an act Subhash believes will free them all, he marries Gauri and brings her to America to raise his brother’s child.

That things don’t go quite as Subhash hopes will come as little surprise to readers of Lahiri, whose subject has always been the complex root systems of families, cut and transplanted, trailing thwarted dreams and former selves. In Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize–winning debut story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, Bengali couples navigated the strange new terrains of marriage and Western culture; The Namesake and Unaccustomed Earth found their American children shouldering the expectations of elders while pursuing their own manifest destinies. The Lowland, her most ambitious work to date, marks the author’s shift in perspective toward that of a parent, with all its heightened vulnerability.

Though scandalous, Subhash and Gauri’s ad hoc arrangement begins not unlike a traditional arranged marriage, with careful respect and moments of tenderness. But as the stripped-down sentences accrue with a kind of geologic inevitability, Lahiri renders the undertow of grief and loss that pulls them apart. Taking scissors to her hair and saris, Gauri retreats from Subhash and motherhood to the theoretical solace of her work. It eventually falls to her daughter, Bela, a revolutionary on her own terms, to make sense of her mother’s absence, “another language she’d had to learn, its full complexity and nuance emerging only after years of study.”

Novels are often elegies for things that would other­wise be lost to time. Here, over the passing decades, a sacred marshland is sold to developers; a daughter loses a mother, then becomes one. An author, at the height of her artistry, spins the globe and comes full circle.